Absolutely killing tune here— Jodo by Freddie Hubbard, from his album Blue Spirits. Pete La Roca is on drums. Soloists are Hubbard, Hank Mobley, McCoy Tyner, and La Roca. I sometimes forget La Roca is my third favorite 50s-into-the-60s guy after Elvin Jones and Roy Haynes— he's on relatively fewer records. Fantastic energy here. Tempo is right in the same mid-240s ballpark with Chasin' The Trane and Passion Dance. The tempo for crushing 60s s*t, apparently. It ends faster than it started.
I started transcribing, and it just became futile. I'm a little disillusioned about analyzing things in this moment, but you can hear it's a very modern, energetic texture he's making on the drums. There's a lot of interaction between the snare drum and bass drum, and the cymbal rhythm is often broken up, a la rhythms you might find in Ted Reed's Syncopation. Not a lot of defined activity on the hihat— it's largely a three limb performance, with the right hand on the cymbal, left hand on the snare drum the whole time. The native posture for a jazz drummer. It would be easy to devise a simple method for practicing this kind of thing, and tame it and perfect it, thus draining it of its emotional power.
No comments:
Post a Comment